randy's Recent Posts

I captured sounds... but just in my head. ;-)

I think the sign is meant to provoke bewilderment. "If you are worried about this sign, better not go this way." Or, yeah, potholes.

A few weeks ago I went with my good friend Alex Bell to see the biggest living tree in Canada.





Our trip started with an early morning drive out from Vancouver, a ferry to Nanaimo, a couple more hours’ drive to Youbou, in the vicinity of a sign meant to provoke uncertainty:






and the start of the shitty roads. Three hours later, after traveling over gravel and potholes meant for logging trucks, we turned off onto an even shittier road, not unlike a couple of deer trails side by side, that led to our first night’s campsite on a beautiful, waterfall-fed lake. The next morning we drove on just a few more km, and unloaded the Subaru.






Alex had along a case with a Nikon DSLR and a robot panning head, for the purpose of taking the biggest photograph of the biggest tree in Canada. I think the photo will be over a billion pixels, which he plans to print out in the neighborhood of life-size at some point. Can't wait to see it. I spent a lot of time lying nearby and listening to the babbling of the nearby creek, with the little whirr of the robot superimposed every minute or so. Here’s me next to the tree itself:






Alex making some much-needed coffee in the old-growth.






You can find the coordinates for the tree pretty easily if you look around. It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and when it's cold and wet there is pretty much nobody else around for miles and miles, except bears. Recommended.

For testing a single junction of your design, I would just make a Max patch that puts out a single sine wave for the carrier and then looks at the amplitude of a single sine wave coming in.

It's been a long time since I've looked at that centroids code. I don' t know what you have, exactly. I would make sure you can compile the max and Jitter example objects from the SDK first. If you just have that one .cp file I can probably dig up something better, with a help file even.

A great idea but I am struggling to find time for making videos myself. Gotta get back to production...

Anything conductive is fine.

Actually in the current Soundplane the ground plane strips between the pickups in the same plane evolved out of existence. All that is needed is a little space between the separate pickups. A grounded plane behind the whole thing ( on the opposite side from the carriers ) is needed for shielding. You definitely want the pickups in the middle for noise reasons.

I really want to see your hide-covered Soundplane so keep in touch!

Keep the drunken features coming! I appreciate this kind of input.

In general, more esoteric routings like you describe are planned to be do-able in a future, fully modular product that's a little ways off.

I'm curious about whether there is any potential down the road for the soundplane itself to record a performance? Memory?

Definitely not going to happen. Computers (including tablets etc) have so many benefits for this kind of use that any work I put into the recording issue is going to be in that direction.

ok, so i got it to record. it picks up each message into it's own track, so... t3d/tch t3d/con t3d/alv t3d/frm this only works when soundplane's out is set to OSCseq, so no 'thru', so can't hear anything, no pass through to aalto. and playback, no way to tell aalto to listen to OSCseq, rather than the soundplane.

I hear these problems. I think the best solution I have to offer for the time being is, use MIDI. It's really not too bad, if you can find a way to use poly pressure to control a synth envelope. You can do this with Logic and Aalto for example, in the Aalto patcher. It doesn't work with Live, like a bunch of somewhat advanced uses of MIDI, because Ableton decided to simplify things for everyone at the expense of utility. Well, it would work find with one voice, actually.

A few people have written me to ask if it’s possible to give Aalto as a gift. Yes, it’s easy, and you can do it using the website.


If you want to give Aalto to a friend, just make an account and buy the software in the usual way, but enter your friend’s first and last name for the account instead of yours. You can also make a username (login) that your friend will want. However, use your own email so that the PayPal transaction will go through.  Then when it's time, you can give your friend the account login and password, and he or she can change the password and email using the website.  I hope it's pretty simple—let me know if you have any questions. 


I'm off my normal support hours until Thursday the 27th. Meanwhile, I'm going to listen to a lot of eighties vinyl, eat a lot, and be thankful for the company of loved ones. Merry Christmas to all!

My advice to everyone is to experiment with one junction first, in the geometry you are thinking of making. I think smaller strips could be OK. It depends on a lot of things like what amps you are using and what the voltages are.

I think a 6x6 matrix would be useful-- even a 2x2 matrix could be a good single-touch xyz sensor with the right geometry of strips.

I thought of using some kind of oscillators in the Soundplane but the best solution was using the DSP to produce all the frequencies. In general I think using the DSP is more flexible --- with Arduino or something like that you could probably make at least a few oscillators in software.

OK, I added this feature but apparently completely failed to document it. Sorry for the confusion.

Here's how to set up Aalto to respond to MIDI program change messages.

  • Make a "MIDI Programs" folder in your user presets directory: ~/Library/Audio/Presets/Madrona Labs/Aalto/MIDI Programs. Note the capitalization and the space.
  • put any programs you want to trigger through MIDI in that folder.
  • send Aalto a program change message to select a program from the folder.

The folder is scanned by Aalto on startup and the presets in the "MIDI Programs" folder are assigned numbers in alphabetical order. If you go to the folder from the preset menu, you will see each preset listed with its MIDI number afterwards.

To rearrange the programs, you can give them new names so they are in a different alphabetical order. I realize this is a little clunky, but this way it got done instead of not done. Someday I could come up with a GUI for making sets of MIDI-selectable presets.

I have just posted Aalto version 1.3.1 for Mac and Windows to the server, along with the 1.3.1 demos.


1.3.1 changes:


fixed automation sticking bugs

fixed host sync divisions in Logic

new software PLL for tighter host sync

fixed "rectified voice" bug in wave folder

fixed integer dials behavior

fixed possible OSC-related crash in Live

fixed patch display on close and reopen

brought back preset converter on Mac

fixed sequencer offset when stopped

fixed sequencer UI range issue



enjoy!

OK, I toned the wave down for you guys.

Hitting ? a few times after that last one I got some nice bass guitar like vamping.

Reasonable idea. I like to be able to see every parameter at once though. I think just adding more attenuverters is my preferred way forward.

Thanks much for sharing-- I haven't had time to mess with SC though.

Well there is MIDI, which is not too bad if you can use the polyphonic pressure data. I think most DAWs will not be able to deal very well with the density of Soundplane data at 250 Hz -- but that is why the rate knob is there, so you can turn it down to 20 Hz or something.

This oscseq looks great. Let me know if it works at all with the t3d messages.

Use the default value for the attenuator, which is the right tracking amount. Double-click to return to the default.

Soundplane scans at about 1kHz. if each of the 512 junctions were scanned in sequence, that would leave hardly any time per junction to get a good sample.

In general, sampling for a longer time is better, and the continuous wave approach has the advantage of gathering data at each junction truly without any gaps.

I think life is easier for everyone when there's just one place for things and no settings to mess with.

On mac all presets are in the Presets directory, so you can just archive that. I'm guessing you are on Windows where there is less agreement about where things go. It's possible I could have Aalto remember the last directory saved into, or something. Would that help?

I was not in any way offended. Still can't levitate though.

I'm finally setting aside some quality time to play this new instrument. I recorded this yesterday: Soundplane into four voices of Aalto via OSC.


It's easier to play Soundplane when you have quantization on. But here I’m playing in its completely fretless mode. Each row of keys is acting as one continuous pitch control, like a violin string. The rows are separated by fourths, giving the whole instrument a range of four and a half octaves.


I'm playing here loosely in Raga Yaman, and going off the rails a time or two. If you want to hear a breathtaking example of what this Raga really sounds like, Google “Ustad Rashid Khan singing Raga Yaman 1988.”

Thanks for this. I realized that all the automation and new OSC stuff was looking like another update, so I'm keeping this info handy.

Thanks forshaw,

I think the 1.3.1 update coming very soon may fix your issue. Please keep in touch and let me know.

Thanks, will look into this.

Thanks for the feedback and for inventing the word "attenuvert." I know what you mean and will address this somehow in the future.

I'm not going to distribute a solo version of Aalto on the site. However, a magazine in the US might do the same thing as Beat within a month or two. If it does I'll announce that.

I haven't had a chance to try this yet, but I am very excited to!

If you want to save some money, wait a little bit.

Hardware and software and men’s style tips since 2008

I know, I can make a madrona logo patch and you can sew it to a Uniqlo hoodie. Problem solved!